I started playing Dungeons & Dragons when I was a teen in the ‘80s, and I loved it. Then I got swept up in the Satanic Panic, I threw out all my books to “keep the evil from infecting our home,” and I didn’t play again for a couple decades. I’ve since changed my opinion on spirituality, taught my daughter how to play D&D, she and I taught my wife how to play, and now we play as a family as often as we all have time. It’s an incredibly entertaining and rewarding family activity.
So when we saw a trailer for the new “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” movie, we were all thrilled. We saw it opening weekend in Imax, and it was everything we hoped it would be. Starring Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, and Hugh Grant, it is a fun, fast, action/adventure that effectively conveys the feeling of a D&D campaign while also winking at the audience for all the cliches that have popped up in every fantasy film for the past 40+ years.
The loosely-held plot revolves around a group of adventurers trying to retrieve a man’s daughter, steal a king’s treasure, kill an evil priestess, resurrect the hero’s long-dead wife, and…well, it doesn’t really matter all that much because it’s a mess of items just to keep our adventurers running, fighting, shooting spells, singing, and transforming into animals across the realm. The filmmakers know you’re there to see swords, spells, dragons, and witty, fast-paced adventures, and they deliver.
Thinking critically about the movie, however, I was disappointed when the credits rolled and not a single woman was listed among the directors, writers, or producers. There is plenty of fan-service and several moments to make both the men and women happy, but they also had to fridge* a woman in the first 15 minutes to motivate the hero to action, a trope that shows up far too often in men-led writing.
Regarding Bechdels, the film fairs better: 1) There are several women in the film; 2) they speak with each other often; and 3) when they speak with each other it is to discuss their goals and aspirations, none of which includes winning a man’s affection. Overall, I highly recommend it as a fluffy piece of fantasy adventure it aspires to be.
*To “fridge a woman” is to kill that woman for the sake of motivating the male hero to action. It gets its name from a Green Lantern comic in the early 1990s in which the hero’s girlfriend is killed and stuffed into a refrigerator. Look for this trope, and you’ll see it in far too many modern stories.